Comment by etatester
1 day ago
It's really quite unfortunate that the promise was not delivered, mostly for political reasons. I hope that a new wave of reactors and the dire need for clean energy restarts the nuclear race.
1 day ago
It's really quite unfortunate that the promise was not delivered, mostly for political reasons. I hope that a new wave of reactors and the dire need for clean energy restarts the nuclear race.
The economics are not there. Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving. Even better, the solar can come online instantly and expand while US nuclear takes twenty years to start generating any energy.
I'm a huge solar fan, but I don't see energy transition happening as quickly as I'd hoped 10 years ago, and what seems apparent now is that it will only happen when energy storage gets 10x cheaper, which is why companies like Form Energy developing iron-air batteries might be the catalyst. You also need grid-forming inverters that balance the loads since relying on hundreds of thousands of residences for grid-tie is a real engineering challenge.
I strongly agree. We _will_ get there with solar, wind, and batteries.
> Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving.
Are we still going to make the same error over and over again? The day China says "stop" the price per watts will explode, just like when Russia and Iran said "stop".
Those aren't really equivalent. Iran is affecting the supply of oil, an input. China can affect the supply of solar panels, but they would have to do something pretty drastic to affect the supply of the input. Sunlight is going to keep reaching the solar panels that were set up prior to any kind of embargo.
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Well, the thing with renewables is that the energy is not destroyed. When you use a solar panel is does not disappear
Eh, it looks like micro reactors are coming on line much faster these days.
There is certainly a lot of talk about micro reactors. I have yet to see anything materialize in the US. The MARVEL test reactor is meant for something puny like 100kw. Nuclear is something that benefits from scale -larger installations are just going to have better economics per watt.
No it really does not look that way. It sort of sounds like it might look that way at some point in the future but micro reactors are not useful for utility generation today.
Meh. Cheap seasonal batteries aren't a thing yet so for much of humanity solar + batteries just can't cover the same needs as other means of generation.
One excellent nerd-sniping side-effect of those political reasons is that the good folks of Austria built an entire nuclear power station and then never put it into service [0]. Open for guided tours on Fridays [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
[1] https://windows2008.zwentendorf.com/en/location-npp/
Nuclear was never going to give us too cheap to meter regardless of politics. Uranium just isn’t that cheap. Fuel costs are lower then coal or gas, but not so low that operators would just not bother to charge for it
A MSTR only needs uranium-233, uranium-235, or plutonium to start. It then produces uranium-233 as part of its fuel cycle as thorium is input.
Given current found reserves and the current rate of use, the world has about 40 to 50 years of natural gas. Thorium used in molten salt thorium reactors would provide electricity for 60 billion years or so if we could actually extract all of it. That's 10 billion years or more if it provided all human energy consumption. Of course there's a limit to extraction, but it is over three times as common as uranium.
Also, besides thorium one can mix in partial amounts of other fuels, including uranium and plutonium. There is no runaway meltdown risk, as the fission is actively managed rather than actively suppressed. Fuel is spent more completely. The waste products are smaller, less radioactive, and have far shorter half-lives.
Then of course we're always getting slightly closer to productive fusion reactors.
These technologies along with solar PV, solar thermal, hydro, wind, geothermal, wave power, and batteries likely all have a place in the future.
There's a decent chance that at some point in the future residential customers will pay for the connection and only commercial or industrial customers will actually be metered. That's not because companies want to give up additional revenue. It's because at some point the cost of meters, tracking usage, and competitive advertising about who has the cheapest plans costs more than the power the typical customer uses above the base charge.
How can the waste product be less radioactive if it has a shorter half-life?
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